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Tuesday, August 25, 2015

WRITING FOR STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS

WRITING FOR STRONG

FEMALE CHARACTERS

PAUL BISHOP

When I created the character of LAPD Homicide Detective Fey
Croaker, I knew a number of things about her. I knew she was hell-on-wheels as
a detective, but consistently made bad choices in her personal life – including
three ex-husbands (a cowboy, a cop, and a clergyman – the last being the worst
choice of all). I knew she was going to be a strong, if not dominant,
personality. She had to be a cut above tough in order to handle the five book
muck-storm I was planning on throwing her way.

After some of the female LAPD detectives and officers read
the Fey Croaker books, I was pleased when they asked me, “How do you know this
stuff?” They were referring to the stuff
Fey endured in the books which revealed the struggles women in law enforcement
face every day. This was stuff their
male counterparts never had to deal with – and there’s a bunch of it. Their
comments to me exposed just how rare it was for them to find a male colleague
who understood these challenges.

I have been lucky. Most of my long term partners on the LAPD
have been amazing detectives who just happened to be female. The writer side of
me has been paying attention for a long time to how women on the job have to handle or put up with
all manner of things male cops don’t encounter. Those challenges forced successful
female officers and detectives to work harder and smarter to not only do their
job, but to also compete for promotions and assignments within the male
dominated cop culture.

I’ve watched closely and made note of the ways female
officers responded in these situations. These were the traits and techniques I
was able to tap into when bringing Fey Croaker to life on the page. From the
responses of female cop readers, it was satisfying to know they felt Fey was
truly part of the Sisterhood of Blue.

My latest novel, Lie
Catchers, features two top LAPD interrogators, Ray Pagan and Calamity Jane Randall. Whereas the Fey
Croaker books were told in the third person, Lie Catchers needed to be told in the first person because of the
intense intimacy between characters and readers the story demanded.

Telling the story from Ray Pagan’s perspective just didn’t
feel right. One of Pagan’s qualities is the unusual ways in which he approaches
situations. This was best experienced from the point of view of another
character who would come to understand Pagan along with the reader. That put
me, as the writer, inside the head of Calamity
Jane Randall – a very good detective, but still a woman who doesn’t truly
understand herself. To become a great detective, a great interrogator, she
needs Pagan to lead her on the path to self-discovery. He also needs her to
save him from himself.

I didn’t want Pagan and Randall to be a riff on Holmes and
Watson. I wanted the Pagan/Randall dynamic to be a symbiotic, equal partnership.
Randall wasn’t just there to assist and marvel at Pagan’s brilliance – a foil
used to listen while Pagan explained his cleverness. Randall is her own woman
with her own strengths. Yes, sometimes Pagan acts as a mentor, but I wanted
there to be an equal number of times when Randall’s actions saved the day. Jane
needed to be a leader, not always a follower.

But here was the challenge. As a male, writing in the third
person about a female main character like Fey Croaker was one thing. Actually
getting inside Jane Randall’s head to tell the story from her perspective as a
woman was entirely another.

I didn’t want to simply depend on the Bechdel
Test, which bluntly states in order for a story to qualify as having strong
female characters, it has to feature a plot with three specific points: 1) It
must have at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3)
something other than a man. In my head, Jane Randall was already way beyond
such basic notions

I had been living with the characters of Pagan and Randall
in my brain for quite a while before I started writing Lie Catchers. As I prepared to start
tapping out words, I found I actually knew more about Jane than I did about
Pagan. I knew she was very different to Fey Croaker. The LAPD of 2015 was much
different than Fey’s LAPD of the 1980s. Women were now fully integrated into
the department from the street to the rarefied air of top administration. The
last bastion of male dominance, SWAT, was on the verge of being rightfully
invaded. All of this made Jane’s experiences on the job much different than
Fey’s.

However, it wasn’t just the changes in the department separating
Jane from Fey. Jane’s personality was very different. She was a touch more
tentative, a little less self-aware. She was no less of a detective, but her
approach was much more stealthy. Fey reacted,
charging into situations until she crushed them. Jane had no problem taking
physical action, but she quickly assessed situations and smoothly responded in whatever way would achieve
her goal with a minimum of shattered glass. This was the biggest difference
between the two characters – and that difference is what gave Jane the ability
to become a skillful interrogator.

Interrogation is all about becoming the person the suspect needs you to be in order to confess.
You can’t do that by reacting…You have to be able to respond. When a doctor
gives you a prescription and you react
to the drug, that’s bad. If you respond
to the drug, that’s good.

Fay Croaker. Calamity Jane
Randall. Two very strong female characters, yet quite unalike. As a writer,
however, I needed to probe what these two characters had in common. What were
the shared traits that made them strong females?

Nobody will argue men and women communicate differently. Who
buys all the self-help books on communication? Women. Who do they buy them for?
Men. At the basic level, when men talk they report
– I did this, I saw that. When women talk they rapport – I feel this way, I understand what you’re going through.
While women on the job have been
found to take on more male characteristics, because of the nature of the work,
they still communicate on a different wavelength than men. All of this has to
be taken into consideration when creating a strong female character who is
actually female.

You cannot create male characters and then simply switch
their genders and expect to have a fully rounded female character on the page.
Women’s internal dialogue is different, their thought process often zigs when a
man’s zags. Again this isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it is definitely
different. If you don’t address that difference, your female characters will be
flat or at best two dimensional.

Neither Fey nor Jane are simply male characters with bigger
breasts. Neither are they male fantasy figures with no depth. Their priorities
and outlooks are uniquely female. They handled situations differently than their
male counterparts – again, not always better, but different.

I had to pay attention not to let either character fall into
the bitch trap – having them behave
in the shrill, grating, manner of an unreasonable harpy. I needed them to be
able to show their strength in their behavior toward other female characters
without clashing. Women talk to each other, often understanding each other on
an empathic level to which most men are blind – proving
the Bechdel Test has some validity.

Strong female characters are a catalyst upon which
the plot depends. Both Fey and Jane are strong enough to make decisions with a
direct impact on the story. Neither simply wait around on the page for other
characters to make things happen. Fey is definitely no tag-along. Jane while initially swept up and unbalanced in Pagan’s
world, quickly finds her feet and takes initiative back into her own hands.
These traits are part of their personalities – their character DNA.

As I wrote both of these characters – quite a few years
apart – I felt an obligation to maintain their female integrity. I need to
protect them from falling into the clichés so often placed on female characters
created by male authors. By doing so, both Fey and Jane covered my back by
coming alive on the page and talking to me as I put them through the story’s
paces.

Pay attention to the details of your female characters. Let
them live and breathe as females – not male clones. Use the differences to give
depth to your female characters, and they will reward you by making your male
characters stronger and better.

Remember, This is a man’s world,
but it ain’t nothin’ without a woman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Novelist, screenwriter, and television personality, Paul Bishop spent 35
years with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he was twice honored as
Detective of the Year.He continues to
work privately as a deception expert. His fifteen novels include five in his
LAPD Homicide Detective Fey Croaker series. His latest novel, Lie Catchers,
begins a new series featuring top LAPD interrogators Ray Pagan and Calamity
Jane Randall. www.paulbishopbooks.com, Twitter @bishsbeat, Facebook, Amazon

1 comment:

Great article. I've come to enjoy writing my female characters much more than when I first started writing. Am I doing well in that regard? I'm really not sure. But is it a challenge I want to continue taking on? Definitely.